Advances in integrated circuits and microprocessor technologies have made possible the availability of computing devices, such as personal computers, with computing power that was once reserved for “main frames”. As a result, increasingly computing devices, such as personal computers, are being used for a wide array of computations, and often, “important” computations.
However, computing devices, such as personal computers, are still being provided without integral backup power support. Further, unlike their server brethrens, typically, supplemental external backup power supports are seldom employed. Thus, whenever the power supply fails, these computing devices go into an un-powered state, and the system states are lost.
For those computing devices endowed with power management implemented in accordance with the Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI) (jointly developed by Hewlett Packard, Intel, et al), the computing devices are said to be in the “un-powered” G3 state.
Moreover, when power is restored, and a user presses the power button of the computing device, the user typically gets a number of messages from the operating system (OS) of the computing device. Unfortunately, many of these messages are understood by sophisticated users only. Examples of these messages include asking the user whether the user desires to boot the computing device into a safe mode, have the disk drive scanned, and so forth.
If acceptance of computing devices, such as personal computers, is to continue to expand, and the computing devices are to be used by more and more users for an increasing variety of applications, such as “entertainment” applications, it is necessary for their usability, availability, and/or reliability to continue to improve. Further, it is necessary for the usability, availability, and/or reliability to be improved cost effectively.